


Scars

by Miss_Peletier



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Scars, post-season 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-01
Updated: 2016-07-01
Packaged: 2018-07-19 11:38:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7359697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_Peletier/pseuds/Miss_Peletier
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the aftermath of the City of Light’s destruction, Abby takes it upon herself to clean Marcus’ crucifixion wounds. He fears she isn’t ready to see them. Some scars, he knows, take a long time to heal. And some never heal at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Scars

**Author's Note:**

> This was written right after 3x13 aired, so I didn't know about anything that happened after that episode. Some parts, such as what happened in Polis while they were chipped, are AU as a result.

          His feet knew where he was going before his mind figured it out.

           Sleep wasn’t visiting him tonight, which wasn’t a shock: in the week since they’d returned from Polis, the camp finally free from ALIE’s influence, he’d barely been able to close his eyes. Everything that had happened while he was chipped was still too fresh in his dreams, and he wasn’t willing to trap himself in a film reel of those memories.

           So Marcus Kane wandered a moonlit Arkadia, feet pointed toward Medical and mind pointed toward the past.

           He found her in one of the side rooms rifling through cabinets for something she needed, a bottle of antiseptic perched on the counter to her left. It wasn’t surprising that she’d be awake at this hour – there were always patients to see, tasks to be accomplished – and she wasn’t the type to take time for herself. Not when others needed her. 

           They hadn’t discussed it yet, but he assumed similar memories lurked in her dreams if she tried to sleep. While she seemed happier than she had been in the days immediately following their return, she still felt remorse over everything she’d done while she was chipped – that much he knew for certain – and no matter how hard he tried to convince her that those actions weren’t hers, he couldn’t dispel the guilt that seemed to flicker over her thin frame like a tortured halo.

            “Abby?” he said, somewhat timidly. She jumped, knocking a few supplies out of the open cabinet. 

           “Marcus! You scared me,” she said, bowing her head and attempting to catch her breath. She didn’t ask him why he wasn’t sleeping, and he didn’t ask her. 

            They both knew.

           Instead, he made his way closer, bending down to pick up the fallen supplies and handing them to her as she placed them back in their correct locations.

           “I’m sorry,” he said. “I just…”

           And that was the problem. He couldn’t articulate why he’d wound up in Medical in the evening when he could have just as easily gone to walk outside, taken a look at the glistening stars that shone above their heads. But his feet had left his mind in the dust, and now he was here. 

           The peace he felt when he was close to her outshone the stars, put the fresh earthen air to shame. Perhaps, he thought, he’d known that was what he needed. Not nature, but her. Yet his words faltered in attempting to explain that truth, so he opted for an alternative.

           “I wanted to see if I could help,” he finished. It wasn’t a lie. He truly wanted to help her. “I know I’m not a doctor, but-“

           He stopped short as she retrieved a small white cloth from the drawer she’d begun searching only moments ago, his breath catching as she stepped forward and took both of his hands in her own.

           “Your wrists need to be cleaned,” she said. “When was the last time someone treated them?”

 _When we were chipped,_ he thought, remembering. But things were different now, more emotional. When she treated his wounds before, neither of them had been able to feel things the way they did now. He hadn’t felt the pain of the material against his skin, the fiery sting of the medicine against the raw opening where his flesh parted and gave way to the workings underneath. And she hadn’t felt the remorse she felt now, the regret that seized her heart and stopped it cold.

           He heard her uneven breathing as her hands trembled slightly in his. The last thing he wanted was for her to be in more pain. She’d say it was her duty as a doctor to tend to him, but these were wounds she didn’t need to see. Not yet. 

           “I can ask Jackson to do that,” he said. “He cleaned the incision on my neck earlier. This doesn’t have to be done tonight, Abby.”

           “Yes, it does,” she insisted, not paying any mind to his protests. “If we ignore them they’re going to get infected, and your bandages need to be changed.” 

            He was split between smiling and sobbing: his Abby, his stubborn, impulsive Abby was coming back, freeing herself from the chains of her guilt. But his wounds would either be the key to unlock her handcuffs for good or the guard who chained her up again, and he wasn’t certain he wanted to take the chance that it could be the latter. Not when she’d made so much progress already.

            “You don’t have to do that,” he said. “Just tell me what I have to do, and I can do it.”

             That faint laugh floated to his ears again, even if the smile accompanying it was fractured. 

            “Let me,” she said, reaching up to stroke her thumb across his cheek. “Please.”

            The desperation in her brown eyes, the firmness of her touch and the strength radiating from the warmth of her skin – it was enough to get him to agree to just about anything. 

 _Almost_  anything. 

           But this was different because this might not be something she was able to see, something she felt comfortable glimpsing, and she might not know it until it was too late. Until there was no going back, until the damage had been done. She’d managed to ride out the worst of the storm, just long enough to see happiness at daybreak, but what if seeing the holes in his wrists brought the clouds back again? How could he live with himself?

           “Are you sure?” he asked as she trailed her hand down the side of his face, resting her fingers on the back of his neck where a twin scar to hers had made its home. He didn’t remember Indra cutting out the chip, but he remembered the panic when he awoke, remembered his first word after expelling the malevolent AI from his head.

_“Abby?” he’d asked, frantic. “Where’s Abby?”_

_Indra had looked at him with a mixture of pity and understanding, showing an uncharacteristic display of emotion in helping him to his feet as the blood poured down the back of his neck like a red river._

_“We’ll find her, Kane,” she said. “She’s still here.”_

_And find her they did – tied up and unconscious with Bellamy, Jasper, Octavia, and a seemingly fast-asleep Clarke._

_“Abby’s fine,” Bellamy had reassured him. “Clarke wanted to keep her with us until we could find a way to save her, but we couldn’t let her see us. If she did, ALIE would know where we are. Kane, she’s okay.”_

_Marcus didn’t hear a single world Bellamy said. He ran to her anyway._

_Bellamy informed him that Clarke had made it into the City and was working on a way to shut it down from the inside. According to them, she had a plan to save her mom and everyone else who was trapped under the AI’s spell._

_She had succeeded, of course. Clarke Griffin didn’t fail. But less predictable had been the aftereffects of ALIE’s influence, the despair of years of pain returning at once and realizing complicity in the City of Light’s atrocious plans. He felt it, Abby felt it, and they tried to get through it the same way they’d faced every challenge: together._

         “I’m sure,” she said, sounding just like pre-ALIE Abby Griffin. “Now, sit.” 

         She gestured to a lone cot in the corner of the room, abandoned after the mattress had ripped on the side. It wasn’t necessarily a danger, but he recalled how Abby vowed to fix it before she allowed any of her patients to be treated on it again. It was fixed now, the tear in the fabric mended.

          He couldn’t keep arguing with her, despite his worry. She made her choices and he supported her: that was the way things had been for as long as he cared to remember. So he made his way toward the cot and took a seat, bedsprings squeaking under his weight.

           Abby retrieved her tray of materials from a cabinet on the other side of the room, the manufactured daylight of Medical casting her in an ethereal glow. Sometimes he had to convince himself she was part of his reality, that she didn’t belong to a dream his brain had concocted to play on him the cruelest trick of all: the illusion of being loved. 

           But she proved she was more than an apparition when she held his hand, when she collapsed in his arms on the blood-soaked Polis streets, when he caught the tears that parted the grime on her cheeks. She was real, she was here, and she was breathtakingly beautiful. Even in the City of Light, when they’d been shells of their former selves, she’d been every bit as beautiful. 

            “I’m going to unwrap the bandages,” she said, tucking a few strands of hair behind her ears as she knelt on the floor to gain better access to the wound site. “If it gets too painful and you need me to stop, just tell me.” 

            He nodded, his gaze fixed on her. She started with his right wrist, finding the tie that held the temporary bandage in place and cutting through it with a pair of medical scissors. Her touch was refined, expert, but that didn’t stop a wince from prying its way through his lips when she separated the cloth from the dried blood that had held it there. The process halted temporarily as she confirmed he was okay, apologizing, and he reassured her he wasn’t in pain.

           Then, suddenly, the final gauze strip was torn away and his injury was bare for them both to see. He was surprised to see how quickly the gap had closed – there was still an indent in his skin where the nails had been driven through his skin, still a redness where his flesh had yielded to the blunt force of the metal and the hammer, but it wasn’t as horrific as he’d imagined.

           Of course, that didn’t mean she felt the same. 

           “Marcus, I’m sorry,” she said, voice thick. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

            He looked down at her and saw her dark eyes brimming with tears that hadn’t yet fallen: it was clear she wasn’t only apologizing for the flash of pain he’d just experienced. Her apology was directed at a time past, a time they both wished they could erase from existence. 

            It was aimed at that time when the metal had first been driven through his wrists – a time they both thought they’d buried, yet it kept clawing its way up from underground at night, rearing its head in her nightmares of the crucifixion and his of shooting at Bellamy and Clarke. At the kids he’d sworn to protect, the kids he readily admitted he’d grown to love as strongly as if they were his own. The thought that he could have hurt them, even killed them…it was enough to drench him in a cold sweat, enough to pry his eyes open and keep them open until morning light.

           And yet, if he were given that same choice – take the chip or let Abby Griffin die – he knew he’d choose her. He’d choose her a thousand times, a thousand ways, befall a thousand horrific tortures if it meant no harm would come to her. He’d choose her. Always.

          She gave a small sniffle, and he realized she was crying.

          “Abby,” he said, sliding off the cot to kneel on the floor next to her. The tile was hard and the impact was jarring. A grimace lit his features for a brief moment.  _I’m getting too old to be doing this,_ he thought. 

          Then she looked at him, beautiful and broken, and the physical pain evaporated. It condensed into something dark, something that weighed heavily on his chest as he took a deep breath. Remorse set and hardened inside him with every breath.  _I should have had Jackson do this._

          “Abby,” he repeated. “It’s okay. It wasn’t you.”

_He was back in the underground Polis tunnels, ALIE pulling the trigger on his gun._

_“Kane!” Bellamy yelled. “It’s us! It’s Bellamy and Clarke!”_

_Bellamy and Clarke. On some level he recognized them, was able to place names to their faces. But the puzzle pieces weren’t clicking together, the equations weren’t being solved, and his finger tightened around the trigger._

_“You don’t want to do this,” Bellamy had tried to reason, an emotion glinting behind his eyes that Marcus now knew to be fear. He didn’t want to do it, he didn’t relish the feeling of the cold metal against his pointer finger or the roaring of his pulse in his ears, but he wasn’t given a choice. His will had been ripped from him by a handful of pixels in a red dress._

_And then Indra had appeared and knocked him over the head._

        It was so easy for him to reassure her, to tell her repeatedly that nothing she’d done while she was chipped had been her fault. Yet, when it came to him, guilt still clawed at the inside of his chest like a beast unchained. 

         “It was my fault you took the chip,” she said, stretching her legs out and closing her eyes as she leaned her head against the cot’s metallic grate. “If I had found another way to save Raven, if I had stopped Thelonious sooner…I wouldn’t be treating you right now.”

         “And if I had insisted you come with me, you wouldn’t have had to take the chip,” he responded, mimicking her posture. His height offered him more comfort: his head rested against the side of the bed instead of the cold steel. He didn’t feel it.

         “Marcus, stop blaming yourself,” she said, her voice as hard as the tile beneath them. “I made a decision. I have to live with the consequences.”

         Words tumbled out of his mouth like an avalanche.

         “I almost shot them. Bellamy and Clarke. I promised to protect them, to protect her, and instead I pointed a gun at their heads.” 

         “I know.”

         He opened his eyes with a jolt, turning to face her.

         “You knew?”

         “Of course. All of our memories are shared now. I know what you had to do for ALIE, and you know what I did. But that wasn’t you aiming the gun. You did protect them, right up until Jaha almost shot me. I’m grateful to you, Marcus, for what you did. You have to know that.”

          She wiped her eyes and met his, brown gazes connecting under the blindingly white lights.

         “And you have to know you made the right choice,” he said, trying everything he could to convince her. “If things had been different, if it had been you leaving, I would have stayed. One of us had to. As much as it would have killed me – I would have let you go, too. You made the right choice with the information you had at the time.”

         Her head bobbed as she nodded, fingers smearing saltwater across her cheeks.

         “And so did you.”

          How ironic, he thought, that they could each convince the other of their innocence better than their own minds ever could. But it was helping, hearing her say these words, and he could only hope that his sentiments were having the same effect.

         “I thought about you constantly,” she continued, shifting closer to him so their thighs brushed against each other. “I hoped you were safe, hoped Pike hadn’t caught up to you and the kids. There were times when I wished I had left with you, even before everything happened. That would have made it easier to sleep at night.”

        “You weren’t sleeping?” He knew he shouldn’t have been surprised: it wasn’t as if sleep had ever been a key component of Abby Griffin’s existence. But there was something in the way she said it, something that made it clear she hadn’t been sleeping because of  _him_. 

          The thought was both painful and comforting, a salve to the part of his soul that would never be convinced he deserved her and a knife to the part that already felt guilty for his role in her pain. A sound dangerously close to a laugh escaped her, a quiet gurgle that died as soon as it was born and made it to his ears only as an echo.

         “Do you really think I could fall asleep?” she asked. “Marcus, without you here I could barely  _breathe_.”

_The second she was awake, ALIE separated from their minds forever, she was in his arms. He held her as her shoulders shook with sobs, as she pressed herself against him with enough force to knock him off-balance._

_His fingers trod a path through her matted hair, stroked the back of her neck as he felt beads of sweat trickle down from her hairline. He could only make out two words that she kept repeating, over and over and over again: “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”_

         “When Jaha pointed that gun at you, I…” he paused, overwhelmed by the terror that accompanied his memory. His heartbeat soared as he recalled the cross, the stabbing pain that pulsed through his entire being, the frantic desperation that overtook him from the second Thelonious had taken aim. “I wouldn’t let that happen to you, Abby. I couldn’t. I can’t stand the thought of losing you.”

 _I don’t want to live in a world without you._ He wouldn’t say it, but she knew. After everything that happened, everything they’d survived together, she knew.

           Abby leaned into him then with a small sigh, pressing her head against his shoulder and reminding him of a time long ago when they walked among the stars, when he’d found her in the launch chamber. Another time he’d almost lost her. They were exceptionally good at that, he realized – gifted in the art of losing each other – but they were equally talented in finding each other again.

           It was a pity that each time they did, they were a little more shattered inside. But each fracture drew them closer instead of farther apart, every break was deftly mended by the other person’s hands and heart. They were the glue that stuck the shattered pieces of each other’s souls back together, molding them back to their original shapes, strengthening them for the next time a crisis sent it flying into the careless hands of fate.

          “You won’t,” she said as he wrapped an arm around her shoulder. “You won’t lose me again.”

          They sat together on the floor for a long while, breaths falling into sync against the darkening night.

         “Just promise me one thing?” Abby asked. Some humor had returned to her tone, and he was elated to see the ghost of a smile flit across her lips.

         “Anything.”

         “Please tell me you won’t be leading any secret rebellions in the immediate future, Marcus. Or at least  _include_  me in the next one. We’re in this together, remember? That includes whatever’s coming next.”

          He paused for a long moment. No part of him wanted to see her in a jail cell alongside him, but for now they’d ushered in an era of relative peace. It was more likely than not that they’d be elected together as co-leaders once they’d restored enough order to conduct elections, and then they’d plan everything together. 

         “You can lead the next rebellion, Abby,” he quipped, grinning back at her to make the nature of his joke apparent. “I’ve had enough to last me a lifetime. So, I trust you’ll keep me informed.”

         But nestled inside his smile was a real, concrete truth: he’d never leave her out of his plans again. From now on they were in everything together, if only because the thought of losing each other was like taking a bullet to their souls.

        She laughed, finally, a sound that was more Abby than anything he’d heard in the past several days.

       “So much for cleaning your wounds.”

       He answered her laugh with one of his own, pulling her tighter against him.

       “It’s probably not too late,” he said. “Unless you have somewhere else to be?”

        They both glanced at the clock. Midnight.

        “There’s always somewhere else I  _could_  be,” she remarked. It was true. She could be with Clarke, or helping other patients, or even attempting to sleep on her own. It was late enough that she could justify leaving, and he wouldn’t question her about it. “But Marcus, there’s nowhere else I’d  _rather_  be.”

        Her fingers closed around his forearm gently, lifting it from around her shoulders as she stood and retrieved the cloth. It had long since dried, and she began to sprinkle more antiseptic on it.

        “I’m going to need you to sit on the cot again,” she said while extending a hand to help him up off the floor, which he gratefully accepted. His joints cracked as he stretched his legs, body responding to the awkward position into which he had contorted himself for the past half-hour.

         Sitting on the cot was far more comfortable than the unforgiving floor, and nothing hurt as he eased himself back against the lightly worn springs and cotton. Picking up where they left off before their discussion, Abby took his right hand in both of hers and raised the medicine-soaked rag to hover above his skin.

         “This is going to hurt,” she warned him, an apology written in her brown eyes. He nodded, preparing for the sting of the medicine she’d used on him many times before. “If it gets to be too much, tell me.”

         The liquid trickled into the healing gaps, and his skin felt as though it’d been set ablaze with the contact. Jaw clenched, he tried not to pull his hand away as she continued to trace the length of the wound with the rough fabric: though the material scratched, her touch was smooth. He tried to focus on that, on the warm pressure of her palm against the back of his hand, when she switched from his right wrist to his left. Although the pain made its presence known, it couldn’t defeat the near intoxicating effect she held in her fingertips. 

        “Are you okay?” she asked, pausing for a moment to discern whether or not he was hurting but not telling her. He nodded again, and she continued her work.

         It was over faster than he’d thought – he’d prepared himself for at least five minutes of pain, but her minimal procedure hadn’t even taken three.  _She wanted to minimize your pain,_ he realized, and the revelation brought warmth through his body. 

        The stinging sensation dimmed as she wrapped clean gauze around his wrists, tying them tight enough to serve their purpose but not tight enough to constrict his circulation. Her hands hovered over the final knot on his left wrist for just a moment after it was tied, as if she were lost in thought.

        “Abby?” he whispered, fearing another guilty relapse. Their conversation earlier wouldn’t erase everything they’d been through, he knew, but he hoped the action of bandaging him hadn’t undone everything they’d just accomplished.

          Defying his assumption, she tilted her head downward and pressed her lips to the newly-tied gauze.

          A shot of electricity coursed through his veins at the contact, stiffening his muscles and stealing air from his lungs, but he forced himself to remain stationary. This was a new kind of kiss for them; chaste, quick, and yet every bit as meaningful as the others they’d shared. A smile turned the corners of his mouth upward as she moved to press that same brief pressure against the opposite wrist. 

         Just when he thought he couldn’t fall more deeply in love with her.

        There was a moment, just after her lips left the covering on his second wound, that they lost themselves in each other’s eyes. He saw so many emotions churning behind them: sadness, regret, hope – and did he dare even think it? – love. He didn’t need a mirror to know his own gaze held those same components, puzzle pieces they were only able to solve when they were in each other’s arms.

      “I thought that might help you heal,” she murmured, still not severing their connection. 

      “It will,” he responded.

       They looked at each other for a heartbeat longer and then she broke away, striding toward a cabinet and retrieving another white rag. 

       “If you want, I can meet you in the hallway in about fifteen minutes,” she said. “I’m going to have to wash that cloth, but I have to take care of this –“ she gestured to the back of her neck, where ALIE’s chip had been nestled just days earlier – “first. It might be a while before I’m done here. You don’t have to stay here for it.”

       “Abby, let me,” he said abruptly, his voice wavering as she retrieved a new rag to treat her own wound. 

       For all the progress they’d made tonight, they things they’d discussed and the feelings they’d shared, he could still barely look at that three-inch scar on the back of her neck without remorse stabbing him in the gut. 

        It wasn’t just a crimson line that rose from a valley of her tanned skin, still glisteningly fresh from the City of Light chaos. It was a reminder of the pain she’d endured: it was a symbol. A constant reminder of his failure, of the way he’d let her down, of how he’d made an idiotic choice and she paid the price. It was a clean incision and would heal with little more than a white mark to evidence it had ever existed, but he knew his guilt would remain long after her body mended the cut.

 _Some scars_ , he thought, remembering their days on the Ark and the decisions he’d made among the stars,  _take longer to heal_.

         And some would fade, but never disappear. 

        “You don’t have to,” she said, reaching for the bottle of antiseptic and sprinkling a few drops on the white cloth. They stained the fabric for a moment, changing it first to gray and then to a darker brown in her trembling hands. 

         Abby would never tell him, but he knew she was still in pain from Polis. It was apparent in the way she winced when she reached for her medical tools, the way she gritted her teeth when she walked. Losing the chip had been a blessing and a curse. 

        That was a weight she wouldn’t have to bear alone – not as long as Marcus Kane had a heartbeat and breath in his lungs. 

        “I know,” he said, taking a measured step closer. “But I want to.”

        She smiled a shaky smile, the corners of her mouth trembling a fraction. Her chest expanded as she took a deep breath.

       “You’re not a doctor, Marcus. I’ll be fine.”

      “I don’t think this requires medical expertise, Abby. I’ve seen you clean wounds before.”  _I’ve seen you clean mine._

      “Let me help,” he said, reaching out to take the hand that wasn’t holding a medicine-stained cloth. “Please.”

       They stared at each other for a long moment, witnessing memories in each other’s eyes. Abby bandaging his hand on the Ark. Abby mending his leg after TonDC. 

        Marcus holding her hand on the way back from Mount Weather. Marcus embracing her once they were free. Marcus wiping the tears from her cheeks. Marcus insisting nothing was her fault, placing the blame on ALIE. 

        Abby collapsing in his arms after everything was over, after they promised to never leave each other again.

        There was no fire behind her eyes now, nothing that made him believe she’d put up a fight against his request. So he wasn’t shocked when she agreed, handing him the cloth that started a thousand little fires across his fingertips as the liquid seeped into his miniscule cuts. Dull red reminders of a past they both wished to forget. 

         He swept her golden brown hair over her left shoulder, revealing the hauntingly perfect line that split the back of her neck in half. His chest ached from the moment it was exposed, a thrumming pain that coursed through his veins as he absorbed the image.  _I’m sorry, Abby._

         He rested his left hand on her shoulder while wrapping the cloth over his right. She relaxed at his touch, exhaling a soft sigh at the warmth of his fingers against her skin, and he smiled despite his guilt. The cut square of material was a bit rougher than he would have liked – she would have been more comfortable with something softer, he knew – but this had been her choice, not his. 

        Sliding his left hand upward to rest against the side of her neck, he pressed the cloth gently against the still-recent incision. She winced and he withdrew the material, stiffening.

       “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

 _Six words with a thousand meanings_. His words extended so much farther back in time than a few seconds – they spanned months, years of things he’d done to her that he wished he could take back. 

       Abby laughed quietly, turning to look at him out of the corner of her eye.

       “I’m a doctor, Marcus,” she said. “I’m used to the pain, I just wasn’t expecting it. You took me by surprise.”

       She slid her small hand over the one resting on the side of her neck, stroking his knuckles with a feather-soft touch. 

       “It’s okay,” she said. “You don’t have to apologize.”

       He raised the cloth again, choosing to focus on the way her fingers overlapped with his instead of the burn of the antiseptic. The cloth followed its path down the length of the red line, clear liquid dripping from the material to disappear between her shoulder blades. Abby’s grip tightened on his for an instant, just long enough for her knuckles to turn white, and then it was over. Her shoulders slumped as the tension evaporated. 

        His mournful gaze met the incision and the incision stared back. A powerful urge swept over him suddenly, irrepressibly, and he knew that if he gave any thought to what he was about to do his brain would freeze his limbs in place.

        So instead of thinking, he leaned in and pressed his lips against the scar.

        It was softer than he’d imagined– less rigid, less sharp. Of course it also tasted bitter, a byproduct of the antiseptic and his horrible planning. It would have been better, he thought with a small pang of regret, to do this  _before_  he cleaned it. Kissing her after cleansing the wound probably just put the same germs back again that he’d just wiped away. 

        It wasn’t a romantic kiss. This was an attempt to make amends, an apology written without words and spoken through the contact of skin on skin. Yet it was also an affirmation, an acknowledgment of a truth he needed her to accept above everything else:  _what happened in Polis wasn’t you, Abby. Even if this scar is part of you now, that guilt doesn’t have to be. I love every part of you._

        It wasn’t a lengthy kiss. His mouth left her skin after a few seconds, lips tingling from leftover medicine and adrenaline. But a statement had been made, an understanding reached, and she turned around to face him. She was close, close enough that he could see the flecks of green that sparkled in her irises, and he was so transfixed that he forgot how to breathe as the room spun around him. His feeble lungs were only able to provide him with enough air for four short words.

         “To help you heal,” he whispered, and something in the atmosphere between them shifted.

         She crashed into him then, wrapping her arms around his chest as he pulled her close. Her lips ghosted over his skin as she nuzzled his neck, pressed her lips against his collarbone. They held each other until their heartbeats synchronized, until they breathed in and out as a single entity. And then she stirred in his arms, breaking away to look in his eyes for the briefest of seconds.

        She began kissing him, softly, delicately, pressing her lips to his with a measured amount of hesitation. It was as if she wasn’t sure how he’d respond. Given the context of their last kiss, the way everything had felt distorted and the unpleasant realization she’d been chipped, he didn’t blame her for her uncertainty. 

        But they were themselves now, the real Abby and Marcus. Clarke was safe. Their camp was free. For the moment, they were at peace with the Grounders and the world around them. So he kissed her back, pressing her closer and sliding his fingers underneath her shirt as she responded by weaving her fingers through his hair.   

       There was no need to hesitate, he thought. Not now. 

       Not until his fingertips traced the scars on her lower back and he gasped, dropping his hands and pulling away.  _I did this to you,_  he thought, ashamed. The difference was, he hadn’t been chipped when he ordered her torture. 

      Abby knew what was wrong, as she always did.

     “Marcus, it’s okay,” she whispered against his lips, taking his left hand and guiding it to rest on the slightly raised skin. “It doesn’t hurt anymore.”

     “But it did,” he responded, wracked with remorse. In all the chaos surrounding the City of Light and its aftermath, he’d forgotten the other scars she bore because of him. “Months ago, it hurt. Abby, I’m so sorry.”

     “Don’t be,” she said firmly, fire blazing behind her eyes. She dropped her hands to his shoulders, stroking her thumb against the side of his neck. “I’m not.”

     “Why?” he asked, genuinely confused as his heart pumped regret through his veins. 

     She took a deep breath.

    “When we were in the City of Light, I had to decide whether or not to keep them. ALIE made me the offer that if I wanted, she’d make them go away.”

     Marcus hadn’t been in the City for long before Indra had disconnected him. For that he was grateful, but he hadn’t been able to spend much time with Abby there before he was hurled back into the real world. He hadn’t been able to tell whether or not she still bore the shocklashing scars.

     She continued.

     “I didn’t remember how I got them, and she told me they were from a painful memory in my past. But I remembered just enough to know they were connected to you, and I didn’t want them gone. I didn’t want  _you_  gone, no matter how painful the memory, because somewhere inside me I knew how you felt. No matter how the City of Light distorted those feelings, I remembered how you felt about me.

      “There’s no point in denying our history, Marcus. When we were chipped, I forgot some things that you did to me, and I’m sure you forgot some of the things I did to you. It doesn’t matter. We’re not the people we used to be. As far as I was concerned, those scars were just more proof that you existed. That our connection was real. Why would I want that to disappear?” 

      His breath shortened.

     “You really didn’t want them healed?”

     “Absolutely not.”

     He didn’t realize there were tears in his eyes until they poured over onto his cheeks, but by then Abby had wrapped him in her arms again. It was almost too much for him to bear, the depth of her feelings for him. That she felt so strongly she’d keep her scars, just as a reminder of his existence…it was enough to make his heart stop. 

      His wrists still ached from the medicine, but he barely felt the pain. Just as her shocklashing scars were a reminder that he existed, the scars on his wrists would one day be nothing more than a reminder of her. Of how their connection was written in their skin, cemented by scars that speckled their bodies like stars in the night sky.       

      And while he still wished he could turn back the hands of time and make a drastically different decision where her punishment was concerned, he understood her choice. He knew that if he were sucked back into the City of Light, trapped there without her by his side, he wouldn’t want those marks on his wrists to disappear. 

     Because she was real, he loved her more than his own life, and he had the scars to prove it. They would be permanent, they’d be with him for the rest of his days, and he hoped she would be too.

     As they leaned in to press their lips together again, picking up where they left off moments earlier, he was comforted by the thought that nothing else mattered.


End file.
